Open Education: Promoting Diversity for European Languages

In the fast developing digital era, Open Educational Resources (OER) and Practices (OEP) provide new ways to extend participatory learning and help support innovative teaching practices. This represents an important opportunity for less used languages and their speakers but also gives rise to a number of challenges. For example, the adoption of OER/OEP for less used languages can be slow to take off as a result of limited public investment and/or limited market size. There is a real danger, therefore, that barriers to OER/OEP for less used languages can impact on linguistic diversity and cultural diversity on a global scale.

The LangOER-EdReNe conference aimed to bring together experts in open education and digital content repositories with educational researchers and a variety of policy makers concerned with language learning and teaching, pedagogical use of ICT, and social integration and inclusion.

It particularly addressed key issues related to the uptake of less used languages.

How cross-border collaboration can address current challenges and provide new opportunities to extend OER/OEP in less used languages.

How OER/OEP can be optimally transferred to language communities where there are limited financial resources and political support.

How new policies and initiatives can address existing roadblocks for OER/OEP adoption.

The added value of OER/OEP from a (less used) language teaching perspective.

Current state of the art on initiatives and digital resources in Europe

LangOER (2014 – 2016) is a European network focused on enhancing the linguistic and cultural components of OER (open educational resources) by offering OER in less used languages and by enhancing sustainability through OER reuse.